an animal heart grafted onto a human

At 57, David Bennett now has his life saved. The American father has just undergone an exceptional operation, the transplant of a heart from a pig. “He’s awake, he’s recovering and talking to his nurses. We hope that his condition will be maintained ”, says the doctor Bartley Griffith, University of Maryland School of Medicine surgeon in the United States.

To avoid the rejection of this xenograft, researchers at the University of Maryland resorted to genetic modifications on the donor animal. They thus succeeded in inhibiting the production, by the pig, of certain sugars incompatible with humans. This animal transplant is a huge hope for the thousands of patients who, for lack of human donors, are desperately waiting. “It is both an expectation on the performance of the heart and on its tolerance”, explains Julien Guihaire, surgeon specializing in heart transplantation at the Marie center Lannelongue, at Plessis-Robinson (Hauts-de-Seine).